'
"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller
would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely
wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his
green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying
with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon
the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed.
The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports;
his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.
A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats;
his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.
Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns
from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be
not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities
of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm
to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one.
In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is,
is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so
many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind,
except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains.
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